Creative Digest #10: Scope in the short story; the contemporary Bildungsroman; growing out of Auster
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at lessons from two recently deceased masters of their crafts, and how the Bildungsroman stays relevant
Welcome to the tenth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
Upcoming event:
Wednesday 5th June, 5-7pm: Postgraduate Open Evening – Come along to City’s Clerkenwell campus this evening to hear more about the MA and MFA Creative Writing and meet some of the team – and hear current students reading from their work. Register to attend here. Student readings from about 6.15pm.
‘Scope’ in the short story
By Jonathan Gibbs
It’s that time of the year when we university lecturers get to review our reading lists for the next academic year. We look at what went down well in class, what didn’t; what needs updating; what else we’ve read recently that suggests itself as offering possible ‘learning opportunities’ – a terrible buzzword, but it’s a hard truth about reading lists that the stuff you put on them can’t just be brilliant, it’s got to be teachable, too.
So there are many writers – and all manner of books and stories and essays – that I love love love, but won’t be putting on a reading list. The short stories of Alice Munro are a good example. I took Munro back down off the shelf on the news of her death last month, and worked through a number of the stories in Dear Life, a collection from 2012. Two things struck me in particular on these (mostly) rereadings – two things that might in fact be a single more complex thing.
Firstly, the balance between realism and drama in Munro’s stories. They never seem fantastical – they are grounded in the everyday, in the reasonable and feasible – but though they’re quotidian, they’re never mundane. Dramatic stuff does happen. I think that the way she achieves this balance is by acknowledging that most human lives do contain one or two moments of genuine narrative significance beyond the standard entrances and exits – a marriage called off out of nowhere, a powerful experience of death at too young an age, the sudden irruption of irrational fear when a neighbour comes into view down the end of the driveway.
The reason this works, I think, is that Munro never concentrates solely on that particular moment – the intrusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary – but always manages to put it in the context of the whole life. A single moment of chaos or disaster, Munro shows us, can send shock waves rippling out across the rest of a person’s years on this earth.
This leads to the second thing, or a continuation of the first thing, which is why I don’t tend to set Munro’s stories on reading lists for my modules.
A word I use a lot when talking to students about their projects is scope. University assignments come with set word counts, and this means students will often find themselves not just with too many words, but too many ideas – too many elements – for a particular submission. You need to think about the scope of the assignment, I tell them: the amount of stuff you can fit into a piece of work.
There’s no simple calculation for this, of course: it’s not just the number of events, or scenes, or characters, that you’ve got to tally up – your story’s narrative strategy will have an effect on this as well: seen at a distance, events and scenes and characters seem smaller, so you can fit more of them in. The closer your narration is to your protagonist, the larger events loom, and so the fewer of them will fit.
Munro’s narrative technique is one that handles scope with great adeptness. She seems to be able to fit so much of a life in her stories – which are, too be fair, longer than many university assignments would allow; she doesn’t do much in the 3-5,000 word range. It’s partly about how smoothly she turns the dial of her narrative distance (‘scope’ makes me think of telescope), but also about how nimbly she slows and speeds up the pacing of her stories.
There’s a famous quote about short stories by V. S. Pritchett that they offer “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing”, but I think Munro goes further than that glimpse, or gets more from it than most writers. Yes, the dramatic event at the heart of the story is what’s glimpsed, but what her stories dwell on is how that glimpse persists. She shows how much can be found in the peripheral vision of a story.
The contemporary coming of age novel or ‘Bildungsroman’
By Rebecca Tamás
In some of my recent teaching, I’ve been thinking about the contemporary transformation of classic forms – particularly the coming of age novel or ‘Bildungsroman;’ a genre of novel that shows a protagonist's journey from childhood/youth to adulthood (or immaturity to maturity). The word Bildungsroman is a combination of the German word bildung, meaning formation, and roman, meaning novel. A Bildungsroman typically begins with a protagonist who feels alienated and alone, but ends on a positive note with the character finding a sense of belonging or self-realization.
The genre of the Bildungsroman originated in Germany in the early 19th century. In its early form, the Bildungsroman was regarded as a novel that had educational as well as philosophical value for young adults, because it portrayed characters who not only strove to better themselves, but who were able to outgrow or leave behind childish behaviours in the pursuit of a higher aim. A classic example is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, in which the main character Wilhelm seeks to escape the mediocrity of his middle-class upbringing and lead the life of an artist instead. Wilhelm endures heartbreak, has his artistic aspirations crushed, gets sent away from home by his parents to learn a thing or two, and faces financial ruin. By the end of the novel, however, he shows signs of having matured as a result of his experiences. This focus on personal growth and self-realization—particularly through making and learning from mistakes—remains the key feature of the Bildungsroman.
The typical Bildungsroman has a three-part structure:
• The set-up, which introduces the protagonist, most often during his or her childhood.
• Experiences that shape the protagonist's character, often culminating in some sort of spiritual/psychological crisis or loss of faith.
• The protagonist reaches maturity, which usually involves them finding a sense of peace with themselves, or of belonging in the world.
All Bildungsromans are either using, or re-forming, or rejecting, this structure. They are always in conversation with the original 19th Century form.
Paul Mendez’s beautiful, innovative 2020 novel Rainbow Milk takes the historically white, straight form of the Bildungsroman, and re-forms it to tell the story of queer, Black, contemporary coming of age in the Black Country. Though this a novel, much of it is based on Mendez’s own life and experience. The book uses the three-act structure familiar from Bildungsromans, but plays with it. So, the first part of the book is almost its own coming of age, ‘Early Life’ section – where Jesse’s grandfather moves to Britain and confronts racism, struggle and prejudice. Instead of starting the story focused on one life, this structure shows us that a character’s tale begins with the joys and sufferings of their ancestors, not them alone. The second part follows Jesse’s formative experiences, leaving behind the Jehovah's witnesses, discovering and embracing his queerness, working in the sex industry, confronting racial prejudice and falling in love for the first time. The third part offers what is in some ways a classic Bildungsroman conclusion – Jesse finds maturity, inner self-confidence and love; as well as a potential creative future as a writer. Prejudice continues, but he is able to begin to truly love himself as a queer, Black man.
The story uses the Bildungsroman form to reflect on profoundly contemporary concerns – racial prejudice, class, the shadow of the AIDS crisis, queer love in modern society, sex work and the inequality of the arts and society more widely. The frank sexual nature of the book is intensely modern in itself –centering queer romance and sex as worthy of high literature. Mendez says “I'm interested in writing for working-class British people, like Toni Morrison has for Black working-class African-Americans … I want to write about the Black Country, I want to write about poverty, for people who don't know that they have great potential, for whom London might as well be on the moon.”[1]
Rainbow Milk’s innovative form plays with what the reader expects from Bildungsroman. The narrative is non-linear; moving back and forth from his upbringing and youth to different stages of his life in London. In doing this, Mendez subverts the linear narrative we expect. We do not follow a simple structure of childhood-youth-adulthood. Rather, the fragmented movement of the story allows us to consider different parts of Jesse’s life next to each other. There is a strong sense here that the ‘past’ is never past – Jesse does not simply move away from his youth, it continues to shape and interact with his present. Similarly, this novel draws strongly on autobiographical experience, but is not contained by it. Mendez feels comfortable making up characters and adding scenes if it helps build narrative and communication. He is ripping up the rulebook of what a coming of age novel can be; and transforming it to fit our moment.
[1] https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/884yn4/rainbow-milk-paul-mendez-debut-novel-amber-pinkerton
By Joe Thomas
For a short while in my late twenties, Paul Auster was my favourite writer. Someone at the school where I taught English Literature in São Paulo put the New York Trilogy on the sixth-form syllabus, so I read him, initially, for work. The same person had ordered a few others for the library, which I quickly took out: Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan, I think. I remember how easy it was to read these books, how they unfolded with elegance and urgency, how the prose was clear, hypnotic, simple: it’s easy here to drift into cliché and call it ‘deceptively simple’, but I don’t think there’s anything deceptive about it, or at least I didn’t think that then. I remember being immersed to the point of not wanting to do anything else but read Paul Auster novels, and I remember feeling like that experience hadn’t happened to me in a long time.
São Paulo has bookshops that stock novels in English. Fortunately, Paul Auster was one of a few authors whose back catalogue was available. (Haruki Murakami and Philip Roth were two others.) I went out one weekend and bought everything I could find: In the Country of Last Things, The Brooklyn Follies, Mr Vertigo, Timbuktu, and Oracle Night in that first rush. Then the key Auster work for me: The Book of Illusions. For a short while in my late twenties, The Book of Illusions was my all-time favourite contemporary novel, at least I think that’s how I felt. I can’t remember anything about it, now, and have had to look up a review (James Wood) to remind myself of its qualities: ‘[a] painstaking and vivid fictional re-creation of the career of a silent-movie actor of the nineteen twenties… [though] soon hurtles into absurdity.’ I remember being obsessed with fountain pens and notebooks, too, when reading Auster, imagining the day that I’d have the combination that would lead to my own painstaking and vivid works of fiction.
Then, on the day Travels in the Scriptorium was released in São Paulo, I went out and bought a copy, took it to a bar, read it quickly, urgently, and found myself confusingly underwhelmed, disappointed, even. And this happened again, each time I bought a new Auster, until I stopped buying them: Sunset Park was the last.
When we got the news that Auster passed away, I wondered about this shift: what had changed, his writing or my taste? I don’t think it matters too much, though it’s an interesting thought experiment. I moved onto Murakami and the same thing happened. (Roth, I read throughout, and still do, a paperback of I Married a Communist ready for the summer, the only major work of his I haven’t yet read.)
For a short while in my late twenties, Paul Auster was my favourite writer. For a short while in my late twenties, The Book of Illusions was my all-time favourite contemporary novel. Why interrogate it any further than that?
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels.
Rebecca Tamás is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is the author of Strangers and Witch, and co-editor of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry.
Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, and is currently writing a book on the non-academic or ‘literary’ essay.
Department news:
Jessica Andrews’ stage adaptation of Saint Maud will run at Live Theatre in Newcastle from 10 Oct-2 November 2024. Details here.
Rebecca Tamás was recently a guest on the poetry podcast 'The Poetry Bath'. You can listen to her interview in two parts here (part 1) and here (part 2). Her second poetry collection will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Deepa Anappara is co-organising a conference on decolonisation in Creative Writing teaching and publishing with Farhana Shaikh, an editor and lecturer in Publishing at De Montfort University. Educating Susan: Decolonisation and Inclusivity in creative writing pedagogy and publishing will take place on 12 September. More details and registration here
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